*Diary Entry – February 12th, 2024*
I’m 62, he’s 68. We’re getting divorced… After 35 years of marriage.
My name is Margaret Anne, and I’m sixty-two. My husband, Richard, is sixty-eight. We’ve shared more than three decades together—built a life, raised our children, filled this house with memories, and believed we’d grow old side by side. I thought we were happy. Yes, there was routine, yes, the romance had faded, but we were still a family.
At New Year’s, as usual, the children left their cat with us and went off to celebrate in the Lake District. Richard and I stayed behind. During those long, quiet days, he mentioned he wanted to visit his parents’ graves in his hometown and see his sister. I didn’t think much of it—just waved him off.
A week passed. He returned, acting as if nothing had changed. Then, a few days later, he calmly told me he’d filed for divorce. No shouting, no tears. Just, *“I can’t do this anymore. I’ve met someone who understands me—someone who can… heal me.”*
I froze. At first, I thought it was a joke. But he was deadly serious. While I’d been keeping our home, washing his shirts, and cooking Sunday roasts, he’d reconnected with an old flame—a woman he’d dated before we met. She’d found him online. Lives near his sister. His trip to the “cemetery”? Three days spent with *her*.
She’s a widow, apparently. “Well-off,” as he put it—a three-bedroom flat in Surrey, a cottage in Cornwall, two cars, and… the gift of *spiritual healing*. She practices alternative medicine, reads auras, claims to sense illness in the body’s energy. Even early-stage cancer, she could *“clear it”* with herbs and chants.
She’s promised him health, devotion, and—as a bonus—the cottage *and* a car if he leaves me and marries her. Just like that, thirty-five years unraveled in three days.
He demanded I rush to the registry office and file for divorce. I refused. I wouldn’t play along with this madness. So he did it himself. I only learnt about the court date by chance—a friend at the courthouse told me. Devastated, I confronted him.
In his affidavit, he swore we’d *“lived apart for six years”* and *“hadn’t shared a bed in fifteen.”* Lies. Yes, we’d grown distant—more like flatmates than lovers—but we still lived together, talked, shared our days. How could the man I’d given my life to erase me so easily for some fraud with her incense oils and promises of *“energy cleansing”*?
Now, I wait for the hearing. I barely sleep. Some mornings, I can’t get out of bed. It’s not just the divorce—it’s the betrayal. He still lives here but speaks to me like a stranger—cold, detached, as if I’m an inconvenience he’s endured for years. When I begged him to reconsider, he just shrugged. *“Margaret, we’ve been roommates for ages. I want to be with people who appreciate me.”*
I’m terrified. Not for me. For the woman I used to be—the one I no longer recognize in the mirror. How do I start over when everything I trusted was an illusion? Sixty-two years as a wife, and in one winter, I’m just another discarded old woman…
